Darkening skies and cold were perhaps reminiscent last Sunday morning of a Russia where "the Tsar exiled both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, Osip Mandelstam died in a camp in eastern Siberia after satirising 'the Georgian mountaineer' and his cockroach moustaches" and in 1998 the editor of Sovietskaya Kalmykia Segodnya, Larisa Yudina, and the human rights advocate and Parliamentarian, Galina Starovoitova, were both killed in apparently politically motivated attacks.
At a ceremony in Lennox Gardens, conducted by International PEN, to plant a tree to commemorate these two women's deaths, Peter Fuller noted that "Russia has changed since Soviet times, but life is no less perilous in the new Russia, which has gone from being a police state to being a lawless state."
ACT Chief Minister Kate Carnell spoke movingly of the need for this memorial to remind us that it is easy in Australia to take our freedom of speech for granted. Larisa Yudina was the co-chairperson of the local branch of the pro-reform Yabloko party in Kalmykia and was investigating reports of corrupt business practices by regional officials when on June 8 1998 she was found dead with multiple knife wounds and a fractured skull. Amnesty International has called on Russian authorities to take urgent measures to stop the persecution of journalists and government opponents in the Republic of Kalmykia and to bring to justice those responsible for the murder of Larisa Yudina.
The murder of Galina Starovoitova received wide publicity in the western news media when on November 20 1998 two gunmen shot her as she walked up the steps to her apartment, also seriously wounding her press secretary, and casually left their weapons behind in perhaps the most brazen political assassination in the bloody 7-year history of the new Russia.
International PEN, founded in London in 1921, brings together poets, novelists, essayists, historians, critics, translators, editors, journalists, theatre and screenwriters "who share a common concern for the craft and art of writing and who are committed to freedom of expression through the written word". Since November 15 1998 PEN has recorded the murder of 21 writers in Iran, Sierra Leone, Turkey, Serbia, Nigeria, Kosovo, Angola, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Ivory Coast and East Timor.
Murder is the "ultimate form of censorship", but PEN's records show another 17 writers who since 1991 are still detained, exiled or have 'disappeared' in Burma, Guatemala, Slovenia, Syria, Bangladesh, Turkey, Ecuador, Russia, Mexico, Egypt, Peru, Cuba and Ethiopia.
The rain held off for the brief memorial ceremony, but fell steadily for the rest of the day.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday 21 November 1999
Wednesday 10 November 1999
1999: Of Sex and Violets & The Death of Culture by Joe Woodward
Of Sex and Violets & The Death of Culture, written and directed by Joe Woodward. Shadow House Pits at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, November 10-13 and 16-20, 8pm.
If I write in an academic tone about this production, it's because it seems at this end of the century to belong in a university setting. In 1932-33 the French avant-garde playwright and director, Antonin Artaud, published a manifesto "Le Theatre de la Cruaute" (The Theatre of Cruelty). He was a major influence in European, and to some extent American, theatre well into the 1970's.
Joe Woodward has attempted to follow Artaud's philosophic theme - that art is not reality, and therefore can only touch reality at the moment of self-destruction of the artist - beyond the theatre which Artaud wrote about and into the new imaginary world of cyberspace. Here, Collie Rae (Claire Bocking), like the famous Jenni, runs her "cam" in real time on the internet, so the world has seen her violent love-making with Artaud Lamont (James Lanyon). We see replays on screen while the pair meet a year later, both also manipulating their creations Thora Ainslie (Liliana Bogatko) and Stafford Myers (Gregory Poke) - theatrical characters who believe they are real but only become so when Artaud is destroyed.
Should you see it? Artaud would vilify me for offering advice, and maybe others will too.
If you already appreciate theatre based on pure Verfremdungseffekte (alienation effect), you will understand Woodward's style and find the performances of all four actors purposeful and skilled. However Woodward is not a Bertolt Brecht, and I found the play too wordy and pacing too measured. Artaud said that the director is the author of the play: that is, dialogue should be subordinate to action. Woodward succeeds in these terms only in the final scene.
If you want a new play with an original approach to the Wide World of the Web, I don't think this is it. Pre-war European post-Romantic theatrical philosophy about art and reality just doesn't have the bounce-back energy of email flames and realtime cams. Collie Rae's computer crashes as Artaud Lamont dies - but despite its inevitable social shadows, the Web is a new form of culture, not its death.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
If I write in an academic tone about this production, it's because it seems at this end of the century to belong in a university setting. In 1932-33 the French avant-garde playwright and director, Antonin Artaud, published a manifesto "Le Theatre de la Cruaute" (The Theatre of Cruelty). He was a major influence in European, and to some extent American, theatre well into the 1970's.
Joe Woodward has attempted to follow Artaud's philosophic theme - that art is not reality, and therefore can only touch reality at the moment of self-destruction of the artist - beyond the theatre which Artaud wrote about and into the new imaginary world of cyberspace. Here, Collie Rae (Claire Bocking), like the famous Jenni, runs her "cam" in real time on the internet, so the world has seen her violent love-making with Artaud Lamont (James Lanyon). We see replays on screen while the pair meet a year later, both also manipulating their creations Thora Ainslie (Liliana Bogatko) and Stafford Myers (Gregory Poke) - theatrical characters who believe they are real but only become so when Artaud is destroyed.
Should you see it? Artaud would vilify me for offering advice, and maybe others will too.
If you already appreciate theatre based on pure Verfremdungseffekte (alienation effect), you will understand Woodward's style and find the performances of all four actors purposeful and skilled. However Woodward is not a Bertolt Brecht, and I found the play too wordy and pacing too measured. Artaud said that the director is the author of the play: that is, dialogue should be subordinate to action. Woodward succeeds in these terms only in the final scene.
If you want a new play with an original approach to the Wide World of the Web, I don't think this is it. Pre-war European post-Romantic theatrical philosophy about art and reality just doesn't have the bounce-back energy of email flames and realtime cams. Collie Rae's computer crashes as Artaud Lamont dies - but despite its inevitable social shadows, the Web is a new form of culture, not its death.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday 3 November 1999
1999: Women on a Shoestring: Camilla Blunden, Julie Ross and Chrissie Shaw. Feature article.
"The play is set at the crossroads in the middle of nowhere. There will be a fifteen minute interval."
At the Crossroads, reviewed in The Canberra Times at its first presentation in February 1998, was described as "polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia". Based on stories gathered from people in the bush, the play tempered an examination of racist attitudes - through the experience of a middle-class country woman whose mother is Aboriginal - with clever use of humour, movement and song. How has the tour gone, I wondered, as I sat down at the café in Gorman House to talk with the Women on a Shoestring: Camilla Blunden, Julie Ross and Chrissie Shaw.
"One man, you could call him a red-neck farmer," said Chrissie, "came up after the show and told us we were 'right on the edge', but he also said he enjoyed it." "It's treading a fine line," explained Julie, "between entertainment and being hard-hitting." "It depends on the writer - Jan Cornall, in this case - being able to get to the difficult thing with humour," said Camilla.
In between travelling, Shaw is well known for her accordion playing and came to Canberra (after teaching English to new migrants and working at New Theatre and with Pipi Storm in Sydney) as a Bombshell in the International Year of Peace, performing at TAU Theatre in 1986. Ross is a mother of two who did a project on Australia in Year 7 at school in Canada, came as an exchange student to Queensland, studied theatre at Studio 58 in Vancouver and settled in Canberra in 1991. Blunden is a Canberra institution by now, an actor and director who won a special ACT MEAA Green Room Award in 1997 for her contribution to theatre.
These women might be on shoestrings, but something remarkable is going on. After touring, just in 1999, throughout South-Western NSW, the Southern Tablelands, Cobar, Dubbo, Grenfell, Richmond, Katoomba and Uralla, as well as Tasmania and Victoria - ending in Melbourne on October 24 - the team, which includes Maria De Marco from Sydney and the outstanding Aboriginal actor Justine Saunders, have a strengthened 'family' feel as they discuss the development of Women on a Shoestring since its beginnings in the Womens Theatre Workshop in 1979, performing in the now demolished Reid House and Childers Street venues.
That's 20 years of professional theatre, in Canberra - and yet unsung perhaps because so much of their work has been designed to tour, with usually a short opening season at home and a return season after some months away. There are surely more people - from Adelaide to Alice Springs, Darwin to Devonport, Warrnambool to Wudinna - who remember Over the Hill, Empty Suitcases and now At the Crossroads than in Canberra. In fact these shows have been seen by an audience something close to 100,000 in the touring years since 1990. Yet we have come to believe that a professional theatre company never seems to last more than a year or two in this city.
Maybe funding is part of the answer to how Women on a Shoestring has survived: tours are supported by Playing Australia and the Australia Council and artsACT supports the work at home. Yet it is not just money that keeps this theatre going. I think it's a matter of principle.
The company plans productions by selecting themes derived from research into stories told by the very women who will form half the audience in the country towns. Rather than looking for quantity, the keys to the success of Women on a Shoestring are focus and relevance. Once a show is up and running, it may stay in the repertoire for several years - more than 6 years for Over the Hill. The government funding is used to guarantee that all the women in the company receive proper payment for their work.
In fact the need for women to take a fully professional role in theatre was a strong motivation back in the 1970's: the only compromise has been during the development phase of At The Crossroads when the company agreed to take a cut because of insufficient funding, except that the special grant from the Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fund enabled full support for Justine Saunders' position. This play was clearly so important to country women, and men, of all backgrounds that one principle was broken for the sake of the integrity of the work. This has proved, of course, to have been the right decision, in the end financially as well as artistically.
The company operates in an interesting fashion, growing out of the cooperative group theatre structures of its early days. Blunden has provided the core of the company throughout, seeking out actors and writers who are happy to work in what I describe as "structured cooperation". As Director, Blunden's role is clearly defined: she sets up the workshops to explore the research material. The writers (Merrilee Moss previously and currently Cornall) observe and sometimes initiate workshops as they turn action into script. The actors, like the writers and director, all undertake extensive research, seeking out women's stories around the central theme, including their own experiences, creating in the workshops the characters and the scenes which are re-worked and scripted. In this way the actors, even some who have been auditioned for roles in what superficially seems a conventional way, work within bounds yet with a sense of freedom and commitment to the work.
Working this way has created a company which is continuously flexible, seeking out new people, new themes and new forms of theatrical expression, and within which people feel part of a strong network, which extends out to all the women who have provided their stories and who live in all parts of Australia.
At the Crossroads is booked for extensive touring again next year and Australia Council and artsACT funding has arrived for development of a new project on women in film.
This doesn't sound like the middle of nowhere to me, or an interval of fifteen minutes.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
At the Crossroads, reviewed in The Canberra Times at its first presentation in February 1998, was described as "polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia". Based on stories gathered from people in the bush, the play tempered an examination of racist attitudes - through the experience of a middle-class country woman whose mother is Aboriginal - with clever use of humour, movement and song. How has the tour gone, I wondered, as I sat down at the café in Gorman House to talk with the Women on a Shoestring: Camilla Blunden, Julie Ross and Chrissie Shaw.
"One man, you could call him a red-neck farmer," said Chrissie, "came up after the show and told us we were 'right on the edge', but he also said he enjoyed it." "It's treading a fine line," explained Julie, "between entertainment and being hard-hitting." "It depends on the writer - Jan Cornall, in this case - being able to get to the difficult thing with humour," said Camilla.
In between travelling, Shaw is well known for her accordion playing and came to Canberra (after teaching English to new migrants and working at New Theatre and with Pipi Storm in Sydney) as a Bombshell in the International Year of Peace, performing at TAU Theatre in 1986. Ross is a mother of two who did a project on Australia in Year 7 at school in Canada, came as an exchange student to Queensland, studied theatre at Studio 58 in Vancouver and settled in Canberra in 1991. Blunden is a Canberra institution by now, an actor and director who won a special ACT MEAA Green Room Award in 1997 for her contribution to theatre.
These women might be on shoestrings, but something remarkable is going on. After touring, just in 1999, throughout South-Western NSW, the Southern Tablelands, Cobar, Dubbo, Grenfell, Richmond, Katoomba and Uralla, as well as Tasmania and Victoria - ending in Melbourne on October 24 - the team, which includes Maria De Marco from Sydney and the outstanding Aboriginal actor Justine Saunders, have a strengthened 'family' feel as they discuss the development of Women on a Shoestring since its beginnings in the Womens Theatre Workshop in 1979, performing in the now demolished Reid House and Childers Street venues.
That's 20 years of professional theatre, in Canberra - and yet unsung perhaps because so much of their work has been designed to tour, with usually a short opening season at home and a return season after some months away. There are surely more people - from Adelaide to Alice Springs, Darwin to Devonport, Warrnambool to Wudinna - who remember Over the Hill, Empty Suitcases and now At the Crossroads than in Canberra. In fact these shows have been seen by an audience something close to 100,000 in the touring years since 1990. Yet we have come to believe that a professional theatre company never seems to last more than a year or two in this city.
Maybe funding is part of the answer to how Women on a Shoestring has survived: tours are supported by Playing Australia and the Australia Council and artsACT supports the work at home. Yet it is not just money that keeps this theatre going. I think it's a matter of principle.
The company plans productions by selecting themes derived from research into stories told by the very women who will form half the audience in the country towns. Rather than looking for quantity, the keys to the success of Women on a Shoestring are focus and relevance. Once a show is up and running, it may stay in the repertoire for several years - more than 6 years for Over the Hill. The government funding is used to guarantee that all the women in the company receive proper payment for their work.
In fact the need for women to take a fully professional role in theatre was a strong motivation back in the 1970's: the only compromise has been during the development phase of At The Crossroads when the company agreed to take a cut because of insufficient funding, except that the special grant from the Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fund enabled full support for Justine Saunders' position. This play was clearly so important to country women, and men, of all backgrounds that one principle was broken for the sake of the integrity of the work. This has proved, of course, to have been the right decision, in the end financially as well as artistically.
The company operates in an interesting fashion, growing out of the cooperative group theatre structures of its early days. Blunden has provided the core of the company throughout, seeking out actors and writers who are happy to work in what I describe as "structured cooperation". As Director, Blunden's role is clearly defined: she sets up the workshops to explore the research material. The writers (Merrilee Moss previously and currently Cornall) observe and sometimes initiate workshops as they turn action into script. The actors, like the writers and director, all undertake extensive research, seeking out women's stories around the central theme, including their own experiences, creating in the workshops the characters and the scenes which are re-worked and scripted. In this way the actors, even some who have been auditioned for roles in what superficially seems a conventional way, work within bounds yet with a sense of freedom and commitment to the work.
Working this way has created a company which is continuously flexible, seeking out new people, new themes and new forms of theatrical expression, and within which people feel part of a strong network, which extends out to all the women who have provided their stories and who live in all parts of Australia.
At the Crossroads is booked for extensive touring again next year and Australia Council and artsACT funding has arrived for development of a new project on women in film.
This doesn't sound like the middle of nowhere to me, or an interval of fifteen minutes.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
1999: Last Tango in Little Grimley by David Tristram
Last Tango in Little Grimley by David Tristram. the players company directed by Liz Bradley. UCU Theatre, The Hub, University of Canberra, October 3 - 4, 12.40 and 5.40pm.
This was a tits and wiggles show in which, in the strict tradition of very light English farce, we never got to see any tits, but there was an inconsequential wiggle right at the end. Written on the premiss that provincial English people are still as immature about secondary sexual signals as they have always pretended to be, this production was no more than the brief lunchtime interlude between glasses of wine that it pretended to be - at least the wine on offer in the foyer was real.
Liz Bradley's direction was effective in principle, but I have to say that it was only Marie Carroll as Joyce who had the required apparently natural timing in the opening performance. Her forte Oh What a Beautiful Morning lying in a putative bath exposed to the inevitable Vicar was just the right unbearable length to get the audience thoroughly laughing, rather than "smiling internally" like Little Grimleyites.
The twists in the plot of the players company playing the failing Little Grimley Amateur Dramatic Society rehearsing Last Tango in Little Grimley are fairly predictable, with just a little dig at making money - for the first time in the Society's history - when all the respectable locals turn up to see a breast revealed. I think it's fair to say that the players company has not followed their founder's precept in choosing this play, even for a light lunchtime entertainment.
Charles Glyn-Daniel sadly died before this year's major productions were completed - R.C.Sherriff's Journey's End and Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of Water. He had a clear policy of presenting less well-known but worthwhile works by British playwrights, even for the brief filler events at The Hub, choosing John Mortimer's Lunch Hour and Knightsbridge.
David Tristram is not well-known, and doesn't deserve to be. I think if the players company wants to maintain its good early reputation, especially in the university scene, it must choose short comedies for lunchtime with much more bite than Last Tango in Little Grimley.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
This was a tits and wiggles show in which, in the strict tradition of very light English farce, we never got to see any tits, but there was an inconsequential wiggle right at the end. Written on the premiss that provincial English people are still as immature about secondary sexual signals as they have always pretended to be, this production was no more than the brief lunchtime interlude between glasses of wine that it pretended to be - at least the wine on offer in the foyer was real.
Liz Bradley's direction was effective in principle, but I have to say that it was only Marie Carroll as Joyce who had the required apparently natural timing in the opening performance. Her forte Oh What a Beautiful Morning lying in a putative bath exposed to the inevitable Vicar was just the right unbearable length to get the audience thoroughly laughing, rather than "smiling internally" like Little Grimleyites.
The twists in the plot of the players company playing the failing Little Grimley Amateur Dramatic Society rehearsing Last Tango in Little Grimley are fairly predictable, with just a little dig at making money - for the first time in the Society's history - when all the respectable locals turn up to see a breast revealed. I think it's fair to say that the players company has not followed their founder's precept in choosing this play, even for a light lunchtime entertainment.
Charles Glyn-Daniel sadly died before this year's major productions were completed - R.C.Sherriff's Journey's End and Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of Water. He had a clear policy of presenting less well-known but worthwhile works by British playwrights, even for the brief filler events at The Hub, choosing John Mortimer's Lunch Hour and Knightsbridge.
David Tristram is not well-known, and doesn't deserve to be. I think if the players company wants to maintain its good early reputation, especially in the university scene, it must choose short comedies for lunchtime with much more bite than Last Tango in Little Grimley.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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